On the Streets of Cleveland

On Monday, as the Republican National Convention opened in Cleveland, Roger Stone, the onetime Nixon aide and current Trump consigliere, staged a rally at a small park on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River to celebrate the outsiders who had powered the candidate to the nomination. In the mid-afternoon, Stone himself appeared, offering some hype and clarity about what was happening around him. Cleveland, Stone told a rally of a few hundred Trump diehards, was the scene of “an insurrection.” Stone spoke mostly of a revolt by the conservative grassroots against the Party establishment (“the first real grassroots political movement since Barry Goldwater’s,” he said), but he also courted wilder forms of alienation. The conspiracist radio host Alex Jones, whom Stone had invited to speak, denounced the “globalists” and their program of control, and he was cheered much more lustily than Stone. There was an abiding strangeness. Stone—deeply tanned, his white hair slicked back, wearing a beige suit—told an audience in veterans’ paraphernalia and “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts that they represented a movement that was coming to power. Then he started talking about what Hillary Clinton had done to Vince Foster. A single shirtless kayaker paddled up, curious, stopped to listen, and then departed. Maybe he sensed the general confusion—over whether this crowd mattered very much to the events in Cleveland or whether it was about to be set aside.

For weeks, an unease had hung over the approaching Convention, and it deepened in the aftermath of the

But each of the small protests across the city yesterday—an anti-poverty march from the east side to downtown, Stone’s get-together west of downtown, the running invective from speakers in Public Square—took place within a larger theatre of security and control. Nine-foot fences had been erected along the main roads downtown, blocking off cars and funnelling those on foot. On street corners across the city, there were groups of police officers from distant departments, in California, Utah, Texas. A long column of bike cops swept the streets; helicopters circled overhead; officers corralled the demonstrators, presumably to minimize conflict. The progressives and the nationalists occupied separate territories, and the closest the situation came to any friction was when the comedian Eric André tried to disrupt Alex Jones’s speech by the river. Jones misidentified André as the “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, and then invited him onstage to make fun of him. André, who did not seem to know what to say, pressed his hotel key into Jones's hands and said, “I want you to have sex with my wife.” There had been some tension as André tried to make his way to the stage—he had been shoved, maybe a little too hard—but it dissipated. A comedian and a talk-show host were trying to one-up each other. It carried no weight.

The energies that had been expected in the streets appeared inside the arena, carrying the same quarrel over violence and victimhood. If the success of the Black Lives Matter movement has been in showing how frequently African-Americans are the victims of state violence, yesterday conservatives insisted that the moral situation was not so simple—that there were other victims, too. At his rally, Stone denounced the bipartisan program of “endless wars” to an audience that included veterans who had served and suffered; onstage at the Quicken Loans Arena, mothers and sisters of slain border-patrol agents and ordinary teens denounced the illegal immigrants who had killed their loved ones. The loudest roar of the night was reserved for the outspoken African-American Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, Jr., who took the stage in dress uniform, saluted, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear: Blue. Lives. Matter.”

This long Presidential campaign has contained two modes of politics at once—the formal electoral contest and the louder and more vivid material of protest and grievance. For months, many observers followed the latter with something approaching anthropological interest: Who were these people in the Trump movement, and what were they angry about? On Monday, this anthropology faded. The outsiders stayed outside. Trump’s foot soldiers did not enter the Convention. Their ideas did.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.

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